The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [80]
Phoebe was still running, chasing after butterflies, birds, motes of light, the fluttering notes spilling from the radio. Al was fiddling with the dial.
“The nice thing about this city is that you can really find some music. Some of those podunk little towns I stay in, all you get is the Top Forty. Gets old, after a while.” He began to hum along with “Begin the Beguine.”
“My parents used to dance to this song,” Caroline said, and for an instant she was sitting on the stairs of her childhood home, invisible, watching her mother, in a full-skirted dress, welcoming guests at the door. “I haven’t thought of it in years. But every now and then they used to roll the rug up in the living room on a Saturday night and have some other couples in, and they’d dance.”
“We ought to go dancing sometime,” Al said. “You like to dance, Caroline?”
Caroline felt something shift in her then, some excitement. She couldn’t place its source: something to do with her anger from the morning passing, and the vibrant day, and the warmth of Al’s arm next to hers. The breeze fluttered the poplars, revealing the silvery undersides of their leaves.
“Why wait?” she asked, and stood, extending her hand.
He was puzzled, bemused, but then he was standing with his hand resting on her shoulder and they were moving on the lawn to the thin strains of the music, the background of rushing cars. Sunlight mingled in her hair, the grass was soft beneath her stocking feet, and they moved together so easily, dipping and turning, the tension she’d carried with her from the meeting dissipating with each step. Al smiled, pressing her close; sunlight struck her neck.
Oh, she thought, as he spun her again, I’ll say yes.
There was the pleasure of the sunlight and Phoebe’s floating laughter and Al’s hands warm through the fabric on her back. They moved in the grass, turning with the music, connected by it. The traffic rushing by was as present and soothing as the ocean. Other sounds, thin, lifted through the strands of music, through the bright day. Caroline didn’t register them at first. Then Al turned her, and she stopped dancing. Phoebe was kneeling in the soft warm grass by the hydrangeas, crying too hard to speak, holding up her hand. Caroline ran and knelt in the grass, studying the angry swollen circle on Phoebe’s palm.
“It’s a beesting,” she said. “Oh, honey, it hurts, doesn’t it?”
She pressed her face into Phoebe’s warm hair. Soft, soft skin, and her chest, rising and falling; beneath that, the steady pattern of her heart. Here was the thing that couldn’t be measured, couldn’t be quantified or even explained: Phoebe was herself alone. You could not, finally, categorize a human being. You could not presume to know what life was or what it might hold.
“Oh, sweetie, it’s all right,” she said, smoothing Phoebe’s hair.
But Phoebe’s sobs were giving way to a wheezing like the croup she’d suffered as a child. Her palm was swelling; the back of her hand and her fingers too. Caroline felt herself grow still inside, even as she rose swiftly and called to Al.
“Hurry!” she cried, her voice so loud and strange. “Oh Al, she’s allergic.”
She was lifting Phoebe, heavy in her arms, and then she paused, bewildered, because her keys were in her purse on the kitchen counter and she couldn’t figure out how to open the door while holding Phoebe, who was wheezing harder now. Then Al was there, taking Phoebe and running to the car, and Caroline had the keys somehow, the keys and her purse. She drove as fast as she dared through the city streets. By the time they reached the hospital, Phoebe’s breath was coming in short, desperate gasps.
They left the car at the entrance and Caroline grabbed the first nurse she saw.
“It’s an allergic reaction. We need to see a doctor now.”
The nurse was older, a bit heavyset, her gray hair turned under in a pageboy. She led them through a set of steel doors where Al put Phoebe gently, gently, on the gurney. Phoebe was struggling to breathe